Community Sampling

Abstract

A long tradition of sociological research suggests that crime has a history in particular locales, regardless of the population inhabiting those locales (Reiss 1986). Community influences on crime arguably remain, even when individual-level characteristics are taken into account. Moreover, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect that individual characteristics, family processes, and life transitions interact with community characteristics to explain criminal careers. In particular, trajectories of within-individual longitudinal change may differ by community context. For example, within-individual effects of changes in employment status (e.g., employment to unemployment) on criminal careers might be more salient for youth in socially disorganized areas as compared to youth in socially organized, stable communities. Perhaps more crucially, relations between race and crime may be a product of interactions between community context (e.g., segregation, concentration of family disruption, sparse social networks) and developmental pathways or life transitions.